The Stanley Parable

How do you explain a game that isn’t your normal type of game, a game you go to, explore but makes no sense whatsoever, well how about a game that makes you have mixed emotions during the experience. The Stanley Parable, Developed by Davey Wreden (who originally developed the mod) and Galactic Cafe’s Davey Wreden and William Pugh (who did the remake we see today), this is one of those games where I question human life, who we are and what were meant to do.

You play as Stanley, he works in an office on his computer, working every day of every month of every year, one day, he realises that everyone has disappeared in his workplace so he decides to explore the office with the help of a narrator, but when you have the choice to go to the left or right door, this is where the story begins to go topsy-turvy, when making these decisions you have different types of endings and most of them very weird and very meta.

The narration is where it’s at, see, the developer wanted to make this because video games nowadays follow a linear path, sometimes in inFamous it can be non-linear depending on who you want to be, this game takes linear narration and twists it on its head. The narrator has this booming but very friendly voice, but going through the game he turns chilling depending on your decision, he reminds me of GlaDOS from Portal, just very weird.

The game looks like Half-Life 2, it’s a nice looking game in some places, speaking of Half-Life 2, they actually used Source so for anyone who played Half-Life 2 you can see some similarities. I’m not going to tell you anymore because it’s really a game you must experience for yourself.
Overall, it does can be a very thought-provoking game, with issues on fear, morals, dreams, choices, consequences, and then some. The minutes you play on this game is a mixed bag; if you play with different directions it can change the length of the game. My only issue is the fact that it’s like Memento, after you find the endings there’s no replay value. In the end it ends so fast, but for Stanley, the game never ends.